I've been to mountain top: As life winds down, the opening sentence of this paper lifts me. [View all]

The paper in question is this one: Carbon Dots@Ti3C2Tx-MXene 0D/2D Hybrid Composites toward High-Performance Lubricating Additives under Varying Temperatures Junhai Wang, Yu Kan, Tingting Yan, Wenfeng Liang, Lixiu Zhang, Xinran Li, and Siyang Gao ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering 2024 12 (1), 96-110.

The sentence is this one:

Since Chernobyl, by demonstrating the worst case, made me pronuclear, my life has been filled with nuclear dreams and nuclear sighs, the latter about what could have, should have been. The planet would not have been in flames, should not have been in flames.

Trust me, a sentence like this one to open a paper on tribology would have been absolutely startling to see just ten years ago. But here it is the first thing mentioned as a high technology is what I have bolded, nuclear power, before aerospace and aviation.

The best time to have done this, to have gone nuclear to save the environment, would have been 30 years ago. The next best time is now.

I will not live to see the world saved, if it is saved, but this sentence alone gives me hope for a future I will not see.

I've been to the mountain top.